[HacktionLab] how many pages, was: printing quotes

[John Hodge]

Hi there
How many pages are people are talking about here?

Ana's text below suggests 12 pages including cover (that's 3 sheets of A4 paper printed both sides and folded). You could get 600 words on an A5 sheet but without pics or other extras - any tighter and it'd be very crammed. Plus you presumably need one page for contents (let alone an index, list of references, etc) - so it's doable but tight.

Another email suggests 24 pages - which would be bags of room.

I would suggest doing 16 pages (4 x A4 sheets folded) - that would allow several of the articles to be longer than 600 - with added pics - plus there would be a page for a contents table. It would be easier to read than if it was 12 pages.

Unless people really want 24 pages: the room could be used to make it even easier on the eyes, plus pics, and it would loose the crammed density normally associated with zines.

People need to make a choice - how much extra to spend to make it easier to read and less crammed.

Having done several pamphlets and seen hundreds, the more I see the more I realise that zines with tiny fonts and inpenetratable blocks of text which are poorly printed don't help deseminate the material - if you're trying to get new people into stuff, then go the extra distance to make it something that new people can get their heads around - It's stuff like having clear, consistent entry points for text like headlines and subheads, highlighted bits and blocks of text which have a sort of visual logic to them - none of which is possible if the thing is really crammed.

Cheers
John H





________________________________
From: ana <anap at riseup.net>
To: An occasional convergence to discuss technical topics <hacktionlab at lists.psand.net>
Sent: Thu, 15 April, 2010 19:51:24
Subject: [HacktionLab] printing quotes, was:  Do you need a hand with your book?



Mike Harris wrote:
> each
> chapter article is about 600 words, 
>  

I count 10 chapters including the introduction so that is 6,000 (six
thousand) words roughly, right? Depending on typeface, that can be
around 10 pages without the covers.

I'm asking because, to ask for quotes, we need to tell the printers the
amount of pages it has. One way would be to wait until the whole text is
proofread and decided on, then produce the pdfs with pagination etc and
present that to the printers so they can give us a quote.

Otherwise we need to tell them how many pages there are and if it's
colour or b&w

ana

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